


Clothed As Men

by LuckyREBD



Category: Invaders, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-19
Updated: 2012-07-19
Packaged: 2017-11-10 07:33:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/463781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyREBD/pseuds/LuckyREBD
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toro muses internally on the state of things, how much between them and the world has changed. (Set during the Torch miniseries.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clothed As Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ani_bester](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ani_bester/gifts).



The material is too tight. The tightness is familiar, but unneeded. As long as the material doesn't burn it doesn't matter if it is tight or not.  
Stretching out he feels the way it pulls and yet doesn't pull, molding and changing with his body's movements as instinctively and fluidly as his own skin. A queer sensation, a queer thought of how much has changed since he died. That at one point he survived with the bare minimum of fabric because there was no more to give, and yet now they make garments for men and for gods that don't break, don't burn, don't tarnish.

It feels like he is growing into bones that are too big, a body that is adult yet he had been something else for so long. Never a child, no. Not a child since a distant memory of colours and lights, before the flames, before loss. Yet certainly not a man either, even once married he was still too small, too youthful in the face to be regarded as an adult with the rest. 

The style was his own choice, and he wonders if the man beside him has the presence of mind, the memory, the intrinsic sense of self to know and understand what that choice had been. The high neck and collar, the amount it covers, even down to the band at his waist it screams to him of bomb shells crashing overhead in the dead of night, huddled low in dirt graves held close to the glaring red of an outfit so similar.  
So similar to the one on the man beside him, who is this memory but is not.  
The mechanical precision to the motions, the way he makes no effort to pretend to blink or breathe and is unaware how unsettled those simple omissions make the common men they encounter.   
Common men.  
The very idea is preposterous in and of itself.  
In the days he remembers, no man or woman was common. There were men who flew and men who moved mountains, but these were still men, the same men who provided for their families and protected their rights. Men who fought and died for ideals alongside men who had no ideals to their own.

The material feels tight.  
Distantly, he wishes he could reach out with a tendril of flame, the barest touch to communicate all the uncertainty, the loss, the inability to belong that plagues his mind since crawling out of the dirt. Certainly the man beside his still feels these things, more acutely than any of them had, would he still?  
Yet, with the way the world turns, with the way society has changed.  
No, the way the world has changed,  
He can only wonder when it had become that neither of them were human. Feeling as if somehow that title had been stripped so easily from him, yet was one the other man had never had the chance to carry. Like human, almost human, different and dangerous. 

Angry eyes, eyes full of storms and waves crashing, full of so much more than human men flash in his mind, and for a moment he smiles.


End file.
